Busacca Gallery

Call For Commissions. Camel Cigarette advertising memorabilia boxes by artist Robert Larson: printed, discarded, discovered, aged, and repurposed. These memorabilia boxes are works on paper. "The Art of Discarded Packages": Each cigarette box serves as a found object, showcasing its unique patina. Larson meticulously cuts it into a geometric, uniform shape and artfully pastes each one onto a paper surface, creating an original montage and a unique composition. The materials are discovered along railroad tracks and gutters. It takes him years to accumulate enough material to craft one incredibly unique piece of art. Projects are artistic endeavors that take inspiration from and build upon the ideas of urban scavenging. They are often created to address thematic concerns of specific exhibitions or to capture the idiosyncrasies of particular environments. Robert Larson (b. 1968, Santa Cruz, CA) attended Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA and California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. He has participated in group and solo exhibitions at venues including The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, CA; Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, CA; Eyebuzz Fine Art in Tarrytown, NY; Elouise Pickard Smith Gallery at UC Santa Cruz; Coachella Valley Art Center in Indio, CA; SFMOMA Artists Gallery; and the Kala Arts Institute. Larson is the recipient of both the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and the Tom Allen Painting Scholarship. His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Arts Observer, Droste Effect, Beautiful Decay, Design Milk, and Wall Street International. Larson is represented by some of the top contemporary galleries in the country and he currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA.

Robert Larson creates richly textured, visually meticulous collages using trash collected from urban environments that hint at sacred geometry while emphasizing socio-political concerns, psychogeography, and the search for the American Dream. Larson considers the gestures of moving the body long distances through the landscape and of bending to collect detritus as performative in-situ action painting. On long-distance scavenging excursions, bits are collected, then sorted, stored, arranged, cut, and glued, over the course of weeks and months. Larson’s practice requires a ritualistic dedication that he has maintained for over twenty years—a journey of epic proportions, resulting in works of iconic and poetic significance. Larson’s relationship to material and appropriation remains true to the found object aesthetic, following in the path of predecessors such as Ed Kienholz, Kurt Schwitters, and Robert Rauschenberg, while keeping in dialog with contemporary practitioners such as Mark Bradford and Richard Prince.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_art

The term found art—more commonly found object (French: objet trouvé) or readymade—describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th-century. Found art derives its identity as art from the designation placed upon it by the artist. The context into which it is placed (e.g. a gallery or museum) is usually also a highly relevant factor. The idea of dignifying commonplace objects in this way was originally a shocking challenge to the accepted distinction between what was considered art as opposed to not art. Although it may now be accepted in the art world as a viable practice, it continues to arouse questioning, as with the Tate Gallery's Turner Prize exhibition of Tracey Emin's My Bed, which consisted literally of her unmade and dishevelled bed. In this sense the artist gives the audience time and a stage to contemplate an object. Appreciation of found art in this way can prompt philosophical reflection in the observer. Found art, however, has to have the artist's input, at the very least an idea about it, i.e. the artist's designation of the object as art, which is nearly always reinforced with a title. There is mostly also some degree of modification of the object, although not to the extent that it cannot be recognised. The modification may lead to it being designated a "modified", "interpreted" or "adapted" found object.